‘I just can’t crack your code,’ said Justin Timberlake. Well, if he is referring to the various ID codes that ‘Holy Grail’ is identified as then his concern is quite understandable. Much like ISBN for books, artists, albums, recordings and musical works also require some sort of identification system. They are often numbers of various …

Music metadata is a vast subject. So far, we have talked about various bits of data that make up our database such as location, aliases, and studios. However, we have yet to touch the most fundamental element: the music. While Decibel mainly deals with contextual metadata, we do include some musical elements information into our …

Ah, punctuation marks. The mortar to our alphabet bricks. When talking about punctuation marks, we often think about strict writing rules to abide to: end sentences with periods, use commas to separate clauses, and the list goes on… Fortunately (or unfortunately) in the flamboyant world of music, such rules tend to be broken. For artists …

Hello there! A late happy new year from us at Decibel. We just got back to our metadata HQ and we have been prepping things up for the new year. One of the things we are working on is our blog posts plan for the year. A number of interesting subjects like musical keys and …

When it comes to music metadata, there’s a vast number of fields that we can explore: genre, album, and arguably most important, the artist’s name. When you go to a record store, you’re more than likely going to be sorting through albums alphabetically by artist name, so it’s imperative that we have perfect metadata relating …

Christmas is near, and that means Christmas songs will raid radios, stores and supermarkets soon. Love them or hate them, they have been crucial in shaping the atmosphere of the most wonderful time of the year. The music industry can testify to this. Holiday season is the period when album sales are the highest. That …

Recently in our post about the future of the MP3 vs. Streaming services we briefly covered a new music file format being developed by Apple with the aid of Bono. This new file format is going to immerse the user in not only high quality audio, but visuals as well, allowing the user to interact …

Our favourite albums and artists tend to attract a kind of mysticism. Dark Side of the Moon has its trippy linkup with the Wizard of Oz (somewhat believable), Led Zeppelin IV has its eerie “satanic” messages backmasked in the vocals (fairly unbelievable) and the Beatles have their “Paul is dead” theory (utter nonsense). People hold these …

As streaming services become increasingly popular and both digital and physical music sales fall, we’re faced with many different music discovery options. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that despite digital sales decreasing, streaming has “helped overall digital revenue increase to $2.22 billion in the first six months of the year”. As more streaming …

For anyone reading this whose first language is English, language within music might not seem much of an issue. The music we listen to will lyrically be of our own tongue, and chances are it will come from a country that speaks English – the UK, North America, Ireland – so we tend not to …